A number of techniques have been proposed and developed to use logic devices or information appliances to index, search, annotate, and access information. The need for such techniques has increased dramatically with the advent and increased use of the WWW and extensive data banks of information available on private networks (intranets) or storage devices (such as memory or readable media such as DVD, disks or CDs).
In addition, the expected growth in smaller screen, non-PC information appliances to access the Internet or other information sources will outdate typical methods for accessing information today. For example, many users access or find information on the web using a search engine (such as Altavista, Excite, Google, Lycos, Infoseek, etc.) or through an index list (such as Yahoo). While these services have given tens of millions access to information on the WWW, there are a number of known shortcomings. Generally, all of the services work by providing a listing of sites in response to user input. This listing may include just the name of the sites or may include the name and some additional information, such as the title, the first line of text, and/or some line of text in context with the search word. If the user wishes to learn additional information about a site, the user indicates the URL from the site list and opens the first page of the site. However, depending on the design of the site, the user may have to access several different pages and view or hear a substantial amount of text in order to find information of interest.
In cases where a user is on a small display device, such as a cell phone with a display or a PDA or audio device, opening a web site to scan and locate information of interest can be very difficult. In addition, accessing sites through typing in a URL is not practical for small screen, handheld devices. Reformatting websites for such devices generally requires a content publisher to perform an entire reformatting of web sites or pages specifically for a small screen device.
Some more recently developed technologies have attempted to present web pages to users with additional information.
InXight is designed to present a list of web pages and to display an executive summary to the right of the list when a mouse is placed over a listed URL.
AvantGo and other companies offer “Web Clipping” which is a way for publishing in text-only format that will fit on a Personal Digital Assistant. This service works as a means for re-publishing/re-formatting content for the new devices.
IBM's Intelligent Miner technology classifies organization types and people found in documents and gives standard long summaries of pages.
PassCall (additional information available at http://www.passcall.com/)and others take existing Web pages made for PCs and determine how to display the entire content (i.e. all of the text) of a webpage on a cell phone.
What is needed is a method and/or apparatus that will allow users to quickly review content sources to find information of interest.
Prior Patents
Several prior patents have been located that may be related to the invention or may provide background information. Listing of these patents here should not be taken to indicate that any formal search has been completed or that any of these patents constitute prior art. Discovered patents include:                U.S. Pat. No. 5,864,863 (Burrows), Method for parsing, indexing and searching World-Wide Web pages;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,884,035 (Butman, et al.), Dynamic distributed group registry apparatus and method for collaboration and selective sharing of information;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,842,206 (Sotomayer), Computerized method and system for qualified searching of electronically stored documents;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,748,930 (Prkash), Method and apparatus for interfacing with a host computer system sharing tasks with another user on a client computer system;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,708,825 (Sotomayer), Automatic summary page creation and hyperlink generation;        U.S. Pat. No. 5,649,186 (Ferguson), System and method for a computer-based dynamic information clipping service.        